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Myths, facts and the Chevy Volt

September 12, 2012

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The election is less than two months away, so it must be time to bash the Chevy Volt.

I’m referring to a Washington Post piece titled “GM’s vaunted Volt is on the road to nowhere fast.” I cite the Post piece only because it’s the latest; there have been other similar pieces in other quote-unquote mainstream media outlets.

For the most part they trot out the same old arguments. They reference the Department of Energy study that assumed General Motors would sell 120,000 Volts in 2012, that GM hasn’t come close to that and that the firm recently shut down Volt production at its Hamtramck, Mich., plant. And they claim that the car wouldn’t exist without President Obama forcing GM’s hand . . . blah, blah, blah.

(So the Volt not meeting some Department of Energy number makes it a failure? I guess to The Washington Post it does. Hmmm. I wonder if anybody at the Post could be bothered to call GM to get a comment, rather than just automatically printing the DOE number. But I digress.)

In our ongoing effort to keep you the Autoweek reader the most informed car people on the planet, here are some facts:

The Hamtramck plant didn’t shut down due to poor Volt sales. GM is taking the plant down to retool for the new 2014 Chevy Impala, all the while balancing Volt production and inventory.

President Obama didn’t force the Volt down GM’s corporate throat. In fact, Volt development began in April 2006. You’ll recall the concept was revealed at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January, 2007. Further to that point, the notion that President Obama is subsidizing the car doesn’t ring true either. In fact, President George W. Bush signed into law the federal tax credit of up to $7,500 for any electric vehicle, so long as it had a battery capacity of 16 kW or more.

Another mainstream myth that needs busting is that GM loses $49,000 for each Volt built and that the company is artificially pumping up sales with cheap lease deals. No question an electric vehicle is expensive to develop. But a lot of the math I see out there is flawed. Why? Because the cost is not being allocated across the product’s lifetime, it’s being allocated against vehicles sold so far. It also fails to account for future GM vehicles that will use the technology developed for the Volt, such as Cadillac’s ELR. So of course the “development” cost is going to be huge. At some point the Volt will break even and will eventually make money as sales increase—August was the Volt’s best month yet. And don’t forget: GM has done the financial heavy lifting on these types of vehicles. The next generation will be much less expensive to develop.

Is the Volt fun to drive? Perhaps not in the classic rubber-burning, throw-it-into-a-corner sense. I’ll admit, given the keys to a Volt and say, a Ferrari F12, I’d jump in the Ferrari first, no question.

But driving one of, if not the highest-tech cars on the planet can be fun in its own way. The technology is fascinating, and that’s fun.

A friend of mine who owns a Volt says he is saving eight bucks a day in gas compared to his ’Sclade;—almost three grand a year.

That sounds like fun to me.

Wes Raynal
- Wes Raynal joined Crain Communications’ circulation department while still in college. When he graduated in 1986, he became a reporter for Autoweek sister publication Automotive News. He has worked as Autoweek’s associate editor, news editor, motorsports editor and executive editor before being named editor in 2009. Read more »See more by this author»